MEMBERS of Britain’s Muslim community feel ‘‘spied on’’ by teachers, doctors, housing officers and charity workers, according to an expert at Coventry University.

Government policy on preventing terrorism, particularly attacks by religious fundamentalists, has come under fire from the university’s Institute of Community Cohesion. Executive chairman Professor Ted Cantle says a new approach outlined by home secretary Theresa May has too much spying.

He says being constantly spied on is going to make the problem worse by making people feel so angry they want to join violent militants. He believes the previous government’s policy, called Prevent, had a similar effect.

He said: “This is exactly what we warned the last government against and what the select committee accepted as being counter-productive, but it seems that the new government has again failed to heed the advice and has followed the line of civil servants who seem willfully to misunderstand the problem that this approach is causing.

“This just drives the Muslim community - including the moderate majority - into the arms of militants and hardens their Muslim identity. The government needs to defeat terrorism by focussing on intelligence led approaches and using real evidence to intervene, not targeting whole communities.

“The very good local cohesion and integration strategies are being drawn into surveillance and spot the future terrorist speculative work."